You are busy today.
So busy that you cannot reply even briefly to each
visitor’scomment. You were busy yesterday, as
well. So busy you could not begin to think of changing
the outdated background music. You were busy the day
before, too. So busy you could not upload a single new
photo. It was three days ago that you began to be
busy. Three days ago, the day a heavy rain alert was
issued for the central regions, a heavy rain warning
for the south. The rain was accompanied by thunder and
lightning. I wonder where you are now and what you are
doing.

If
you have found a new job, you won’t have had time to
breathe. Or perhaps you’ve cashed in a savings account
and gone traveling abroad? Not with that boyfriend you
said you were breaking up with, surely? Perhaps you’ve
suffered some kind of damage from the monsoon rains?
Have you managed to burn the bread you were baking?
Have you really been busy? While I was daydreaming
about your recent doings, the books on my desk were
getting soaked by the rain seeping through a gap in
the window. Among the rain-soaked books were some that
you had once borrowed.

In
order to check the damage I flipped through the pages
and discovered a red stain. A felt pen mark had
smudged in the rain. It had not been there before I
lent you the book, so clearly it was you who had
underlined something. Not that I mind. It was I who
had suggested lending you the book and it was I who
said you may underline things. The phrase you had
underlined was: If
you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze
back into you.

Nietzsche
of course. As I gazed at the stain, I had the
impression that the stain was gazing up at me, instead
of me gazing at the stain. It was the last book you
borrowed from me. Cancel that word “last.” “Last” is
the last word weaksouls looking for consolation should use.
So this must be the last use of “last.”

The
rain, that poured down as if it would go on forever,
was unable to keep it up beyond the second day and
night; it abated, but there is no wayyour busy life can loosen up. I am pained
that you are so busy, and also relieved that you are
so busy. Because your busy life may finally send you
back to me. The people who visit me are either lazy,
wallowing too easily in shame at being
good-for-nothings, or they are so busy that they have no
time to enjoy the satisfaction of being useful. If you
ever decide to come back to me, I shall understand
your neglect of me without a murmur. Did I tell you
when you borrowed this book what Nietzsche cried out
in Turin in 1889, as he suddenly flung his arms around
the neck of a horse that was being whipped by its
groom? “I
understand you.” Likewise, I understand your
busy-ness. Even the red stain ― everything, I understand everything.
That’s my job, after all.

“I
have heard of music therapists and art therapists, but
I had no idea there were book therapists. You must
have read an enormous amount.” Nine out of ten people
react this way upon receiving my
name card. “I’m not a book therapist, I’m a reading
therapist.” My response to their vulgar curiosity is
firm. There are even people who ask, “What book’s
worth reading nowadays?” I reply with a serious air,
“Pay me first, then ask.” A reading therapist ―
I am
someone who heals the heart’s sickness with books.
Just as a doctor diagnoses then prescribes treatment
for his patients, I check my client’s psychological
state then recommend a book that might be of help.
Eighty percent of the effect of any medicine is
placebo effect. When it comes to placebo effect, there
is nothing to equal a book. And there are almost no
side effects. Addiction? So much the better.

There
are two kinds of people in this world: those who don’t
read books and those who cannot. My clients are mostly
the latter kind. I deal with people who want to read a
book but cannot make up their minds, people who are at
a loss as to what book they should read. If the fact
of there being too many books in the world is a
problem, it is considerably more of a problem for
them. Come unto me, all you who resolutely enter a
bookstore or library but then turn back, overwhelmed
by all the books crammed into every shelf, or you who
read the books others have read but cannot satisfy the
hunger in your hearts. Come and find peace, seek a new
life.

“Is
treatment by books really possible?” you asked. You
were one of those clients who needed to be convinced they have come to the
right place. “At the entrance to the library in Thebes
there was an inscription: ‘Medicine for the soul,’” I replied in a voice full of
conviction. You nodded like a meek student. You even
muttered apologetically, “I’m sorry, asking a stupid
question when I don’t know anything.” You looked as
though you were on the verge of tears. The
consultation didn’t seem like an easy one. That was how I
first met you, with no special expectation or
particular thrill. A book discovered by chance on a
secluded, shabby shelf; a book that had never been
checked out and had only a slender sense of existing.
You were that kind of book. When I asked why you came
to me, you replied, “I’m a complete good-for-nothing.
I’m useless.”

When
I first meet clients, I have them fill out a reading
card. Nothing grandiose. Just collecting basic
information about their reading preferences and
habits. You need only think of the medical history
card you fill out when you go to a hospital. Why not,
after all? The card where you write down your blood
type, height, weight, medical history, and so on.
Sometimes the questions on a medical card are so
personal, you feel embarrassed as you fill in the
answers. Some time ago I went to see a dentist for a
cavity and had to fill out a dental record card. I
could put up with the question whether I brushed my
teeth before going to bed but had to throw up my hands
at the question whether my breath stank and how badly.
In comparison to that, the reading card my clients
fill out is exceedingly tactful and decorous. What
books have you read recently? What book moved you
deeply? What books would you like to recommend to
someone you care about? What books would you like to
read in the future? The best kind of questionnaire
encourages people to write the truth, not aim for
“correct” answers. For that to work, you first have to
overcome the distrust of the person doing the
answering.

People
involved in counseling adolescents who have been
removed from society after committinga crime have discovered that curiosity is
the natural foil to distrust. I once counseled a young
man who had systematically set fire to high-end
imported cars. After three sessions, I had still not
gotten that young serial arsonist to say a word. What
finally opened his mouth, that I thought would never
open, was a book I happened to have brought with me.

That
young man was found guilty of a total of seven counts
of arson and was silently hanging back without a
sliver of hope, so what was it that made his eyes
light up? It might have been the unusual title; it
might have been the way the cover design reminded him
of leaping flames; or it might have been the dramatic
biography of the author who committed hara-kiri while
shouting
his defiance of the Self-Defense Forces. In any case,
what demolished that young man’s distrust was a single
book. That book was like the wooden horse that
rendered powerless the massive defenses of Troy. After
reading the novel, which depicted in beautiful
language the inner feelings of an arsonist who set
fire to an ancient temple, the young man gave full
vent to his own feelings, which came pouring out. What
the youth discovered in that novel, written by a
foreign writer who chose a strange way of dying, was
his own sense of self that he had never revealed to
anyone and had been busily denying. Because the fact
of not being understood by other people had become
my only real source of pride, I was never confronted
by any impulse to express things and make others
understand something that I knew. I thought that
those things which could be seen by others were not
ordained for me. My solitude grew more and more
obese, just like a pig.[1]

The young man confessed that as he read
those words, he experienced simultaneously the pain
and the relief of having pus lanced from a boil. The
pain will have originated from the encounter with the
monster that was lurking within him, while the relief
came from the realization that the monster was not all
there was. You cannot change the past by reading, but
you can learn to view the past correctly. The moment
he discovered that there was someone in the world with
the same thoughts as himself, when he felt even
faintly the joy of being understood by someone else,
the monster that he had been rearing without realizing
it vanished completely. The serial arsonist went back
to being a typical member of his age group while I
discovered a new life as a reading therapist.

If
you tell me what kind of books you have been reading,
I will be able to tell you who you are. Your reading
list is your autobiography and the chronicle of your
soul. Forget the gossip that Rousseau, who wrote the
classic treatise on education, Emile, sent
his own children to an orphanage. Give up as quickly
as you can wondering whether the Oxford don Lewis
Carroll who wrote Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland for the daughters of
the Dean of Christchurch would have published the book
if he had not been a bachelor. What you have to
discover by reading is not some kind of ideology
disguised as the author’s cleverly hidden private life
or message; it is your own self.

I don’t say I’m
doing anything wonderful. I have not the least thought
of putting on airs to impress you or of telling some
stupid joke. I
tried some comical stuff, but all I got was a dead
pan, so that gag was out.[2] I am merely a guide
to reading. Whether you find Heaven or Hell in a book
is entirely up to you as the reader. But the quantity
of books you had read was incredibly limited for a
thirty-year-old adult and your tastes were unclear.[3]
In other words you were a book without introduction or
table of contents, where there was no sign of anything
that might be termed help for the reader. Therefore,
when I learned that you were working in the library
run by the district office, I felt as though I had
been hit on the back of the head.

What book should I recommend to you? If
you had been a minor going out on inappropriate dates
with a middle-aged man, I might have recommended
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. If
your heart had been burning with unrequited love, I
might have recommended a novel by the Colombian
author, in order to keep you from sighing the
following words as you fell asleep: “The only regret I
will have in dying is if it is not for love.”[4]
Suppose you had been feeling disillusioned with the
world, a precocious young woman murmuring the
pessimistic adage, “We live, not
because life is worth living but because it’s not
worth killing yourself over,” I would have had
you read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in
the Rye.

You were in many ways a difficult book to
read. Since you did not know how to express feelings
or ideas, you always looked flustered. Worse still,
you seemed to have absolutely no idea what kind of
person you were or what you wanted. Even when simply
confronted with the question whether you wanted coffee
or tea to drink, you would hesitate for a while before
blurting out, “Whatever you’re drinking,” looking
relieved as if you had just cast aside some heavy
burden. When I asked your impressions of a book I had
recommended, you stared at me with a startled
expression before mumbling, “How can I understand
something like that?” What did you hope to gain by
reading? You asked me hesitantly, “I’m sorry, but is
there a book I could read that would teach me how to
make a clean break with my boyfriend of the past seven
years? How can I end it without shedding messy tears
or feeling regret?”

There
are things that, once past, never come back. All the
things that we label “the first” are like that.
Therefore, every first is, without exception, a
“last.” The Prague surgeon, an incorrigible
philanderer, embracing the unbearable lightness of
being says, What
happens but once might as well not have happened at
all. If we only have one life to live, we might as
well not have lived at all.[5] If this reminds
you of Nietzsche, you can be confident of having
reached a considerable level as a reader. If you get
to the bottom of the “eternal return,” so much the
better. Everything that exists always exists as past.
Because the past no longer exists, it exists
eternally. Therefore the past is the future of the
present. Is a one-time-only life transient and futile?
Don’t worry. In the limitless time and space of the
cosmos, sometime, somewhere your life will be
repeated.

There was a
successful realestate broker. Together with his wife and
their two children, he was living a life with few wants. One day, he
vanished. Money problems? Woman problems? He was
squeaky clean. A private detective hired to search for
him was able to find him, thanks to a tip about
someone who looked like him. The man explained to the
detective what had happened. The steel frame of a
building under construction collapsed directly in
front of him as he was on his way to lunch. The
realization that his laboriously constructed life
could have been brought to an end by the chance
collapse of a building had given him a shock. So he
abandoned everything and went away. After traveling
here and there, he met a woman, settled down, and
married her. He felt satisfied with this new life so
he asked the detective to say he had not been able to
find him. Yet to the detective’s eyes, the life the
man was living now looked almost identical with his
previous life.[6]

If
you want to become a sagacious reader, you must forget
about learning any kind of lessons by reading. What
you need as a reader is not enlightenment but empathy.
Those who are affected by a tale of obsession or
post-traumatic stress disorder will empathize with
that man, but you expressed antagonism toward him. You
went so far as to get angry, which was just not like
you. “He acted badly, abandoning his wife and leaving
without a word like that. Not a single word. If he
loved her he would never have done such a thing. If
another building collapses, he’ll be sure to leave
again. He was only looking for an excuse to leave.”
All your interest was centered on the fact that the
man had suddenly left. By criticizing the man’s
action, what you were revealing was an obsession with
the past, and what you wished to hide was a fear of
breaking up. You were unable to give a clear answer
when I asked, “Do you really want to break up with
your boyfriend?” You were obviously dithering. I could
not help wondering if you had been joking when you
told me you consulted me in order to break up with
your boyfriend. If so, your problem must not be in
your relationship with your boyfriend but in saying
you had come to me in order to settle things with your
boyfriend. The book titled You was
beginning to get interesting. Even then, it was only
interesting from a professional point of view.

A
hoary misconception common among ordinary readers is
the idea that the main protagonist in a story is some
kind of alter ego of the author. The harmful effect of
this way of reading means that, like school children
always keeping an eye on their teacher’s reaction,
readers cannot immerse themselves freely in a book
because they are always oppressed by the authority of
the author. Is this the writer’s personal experience?
Is this the writer’s imagination? You were no
exception, being so aware of the author’s biographical
presence that you were unable to read your own
feelings.

As
if you thought self-assertion was a sin, you were
imprisoning yourself in a naive modesty. The desires
and intentions you were unable to translate adequately gradually
grew blurred, and turned into a vague suspicion that
such things might not exist in the end. What you
needed was someone onto whom you could project freely
your repressed desires, someone who would accept you
as you were so you could respect yourself. After some
trial and error with various volumes, I recommended
Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human.
Concerned, I said, “The author’s intentions or real
life are not important. Turn the book into something
of your own. Let’s pretend the author’s dead.” You
replied, nodding, “He drowned himself in a river in 1948, and in a double suicide.
Poor guy.” You had your nose plunged in the author’s
biography.

It
might have been clutching at straws, but I felt that
you were reacting strongly. Mine has been a
life of much shame. As you read those words you
seemed startled. Was it acceptable to reveal one’s
inner self so overtly? What had disturbed you, I
thought, was not the contents of the confession but
the frankness of the confessional form. I reckoned you
were feeling ashamed, like someone stealing a glimpse
of another person’s private gestures. Then one day,
while we were waiting for a train at some subway
station, Chungmuro maybe, or Euljiro 3-ga, you compared your feet with the
footprints painted on the platform. Probably they were
marks from a campaign urging passengers to stand in
rows. You were surprised to find that your feet fit
exactly into the painted footprints; I was surprised
at how old your shoes were.

You,
who complained of unnecessary stress caused by
unaccustomed things and clung to old shoes because you
disliked the stiffness of new ones, were unable to
discard the past even when the boyfriend you had been
going out with for seven years sent a text message to
your closest friend saying, “I told her I’m going to
be away this weekend on business. Make time for me.”
Even the anger at your lover’s infidelity
could not cover up your guilt at having spied on
another person’s phone messages. I suppose the fact of
having to start the process all over again, meeting a
new man, cautiously testing out one another’s past,
trying hard to make your presents match, until at last
you were reluctantly sharing a future, left you
feeling frightened and appalled. You lacked the nerve
to give up everything and leave for somewhere new, so
the choice you could make, when for the first time in
your life you encountered a sentence that shook your
very soul, was simply to read this sentence: I can't even
guess myself what it must be to live the life of a
human being.[7] I too have no
idea what living the life of a human being might be
like but I can say with confidence that the habit of
hobbling around wearing new shoes in order to give
yourself a hard time is not a desirable one.

With
books that are not easily forgotten, it is usually the
early part that matters most. Because of a strange
style, because new characters emerge every time you
turn a page, because of insistent descriptions, one
may give up reading. Growing angry after composing
complicated family trees of people with similar names,
turned off by tedious descriptions of the geography or
customs of the region used as the setting, you may
start wondering whether it has not been made into a
movie. In the case of a movie, it does not seem to be
a problem if many characters appear.

The book You was not the kindto
arouse tension from the very first sentence like
Albert Camus’s L’etranger.
Neither
was it a book that overwhelms by its
sumptuous binding or exciting illustrations. It was simply a book I started to read
casually with no particular expectations. Since the
book You did
not reveal itself at once, several times I felt like
giving up reading. However, once past the first
introduction, I grew accustomed to the strange style,
the characters of the people grew clear, and the story
line began to go somewhere. No longer a book that
annoys the reader, you were whispering: Read me. Don’t
hesitate; read me.

I
read you with precision and care. You were born the
fourth daughter in a family where there were already
three daughters before you. For your father or
grandmother, obsessed with having a son and heir, you
were an unwelcome presence. Your mother, considering
herself a sinner, refused to breastfeed you even when
you cried, hoping to atone for her sin. Once you began
to toddle, you were entrusted to your mother’s
parents. A child that learns early in life that even
crying at the top of its voice is not going to help it
get what it wants is bound to live either killing
others’ desires or killing its own desires. Either
destroy the world or destroy yourself. Since you grew
up feeding on the neglect of a mother who identified
self-torment with atonement, you naturally chose the
second option. But you did not identify fully with the
self-destructive protagonist of No Longer Human.

My
clients manifest one of two kinds of reaction to a
character in a book who is exactly like them. Either
they are filled with wonder, like a child that sees
itself reflected in a mirror for the first time, or
they get upset, like a person who bumps into someone
wearing exactly the same dress as one they just
bought. Identification gives birth to self-pity,
alienation produces self-negation. By your constant
self-negation you had tried to prove that you were
worthless. I had the impression that your latent fury
might have been directed toward your mother, rather than your father. The fact that the
protagonist was not a woman but a man might have
gotten in the way of your empathy. Despite that, you
sympathized with the protagonist for his trouble with
his family. It was as though you too wanted to say: I never laughed
at home. I reckoned that everything I was related to
by blood, everything that was deeply related to me
was unfamiliar.[8]

I
recommended that you read another work by Osamu Dazai, The
Setting Sun. I could not help adding, “The
author and the protagonist are different beings.
Okay?” “Yes.” “While you are reading the book, you are
the author. Okay?” “Yes.” Fortunately, this time the
main character was a woman. The novel is about the
daughter of a fallen aristocratic family who, after
her marriage has failed, tries to gain the love of a
writer who would not leave his wife and family for
her. You loved the protagonist, who rejects the
traditional image of women who accept an unhappy life
as their destiny, and resolutely pursues a new
morality. “Kazuko’s courage is tremendous, saying she
will bear the child of the man she loves and bring it
up on her own. I could never even think of doing such
a thing.” Interesting. Now you have seen yourself
reflected in a character in a book. I began to look
forward to sessions with you.

You were fascinated by the idea of a scapegoat.
Reproaching Uehara for repudiating both the woman who
loved him and his own child, you embraced Kazuko as a
scapegoat sacrificed to obsolete morality. A bastard and its
mother. We will live in perpetual struggle with the
old morality, like the sun. The revolution is far
from taking place. It needs more, many more
valuable, unfortunate victims. In the present world,
the most beautiful thing is a victim.[9] A scapegoat is
not something slaughtered because there is sin; there
is sin because it is slaughtered. In worshipping the
scapegoat they have themselves killed, oppressors gain
control of the destructive instincts that might
otherwise destroy the community. The secret mechanism
of desire to which the ancient Greeks gave the name
“catharsis” applies perfectly to reading therapy. In
thinking of yourself as the scapegoat of ancient
customs you might have been hoping to compensate for a
past full of self-negation. In offering up the unhappy
past on the altar of oppressive customs, what you were
casting off was a sense of shame and what you gained
was a sense of moral superiority. At last you have
become capable of regarding yourself in a positive
light. While you were talking about Kazuko’s decision
to bear and raise the bastard child, you once said,
“The Talmud says this. If everyone agrees that a
person should be punished, let him go. He is
undoubtedly innocent.” Referring to one book in order
to talk about another! You were on the way to becoming
a great reader.

I decided to
give you a token reward for earnest reading. When I
proposed giving you shoes as a gift, you bristled, “Do
I look that pathetic?” It was not the response I had
expected. If you had laughed brightly and asked, “How
did you know my size?” I would have answered that I
enjoy reading you. I would also have smiled,
remembering how I had measured the size of the
footprints painted on the platform of a crowded subway
station, ignoring the stares of passersby. In fact I
finally said, “My wife wore them once then stuffed
them in the shoe closet; it’s a shame to throw them
away. There are lots of shoes she’s worn just a few
times then left to rot. She can’t pass in front of a
shoe shop without going in.”

As our sessions went on, signs of a change in
you became perceptible. You began to look more
cheerful and your habit of averting your eyes as you
talked disappeared. Your clothes, which had been
invariably black, became more colorful. The day you
arrived wearing the shoes I had given you, you were no
longer the you who had first come to consult me. You
became more dazzling by the day. You had a habit of
saying you ought to diet but your buxom figure was
dazzling. Full of shining vitality and bursting with
self-confidence, your phrases became elegant and beautiful. As if unable to keep to yourself such a splendid
transformation, you purchased the latest model of
mobile phone, complete with camera. You had
inaugurated a new personal home page some time before,
but it was boring. You said you had already uploaded
several photos and were planning to include photos of
bread you had baked. I asked how you knew about baking
bread. “I started to attend baking classes some days
ago. I mean to learn seriously so I’ve stopped working
at the library. My dream is to open a baker’s shop
under my own name.” Your face shone as you spoke.

About the same time, you mentioned a television
drama that was all the rage. “A woman like me, none
too thin and without any solid background, is playing
the main role; she’s awesome, so vigorous! I want to
live like that. She’s an expert baker, too. And she’s
thirty, just like me, believe it or not. And her name
is so unusual.” You made such a fuss, it was as though
you had discovered your other self. Since I do not
enjoy watching television dramas, I could neither
agree with your enthusiasm nor add anything to it.
When I said I had never watched that drama, you looked
at me as if I were an alien. “The main character’s
name is so funny.” Seeing that we could not share
opinions of the fascinating drama where the main
character had an odd name, you looked regretful while
I felt uneasy. When you said you would not be coming
again, the reason for my anxiety became clear. I could
not simply let you go like that. There were still a
lot of books I wanted to recommend. Finished? But this is
the point at which the reading of your true self is
about to begin in earnest. At a loss, I blurted out,
“How about a beer?”

Was it because you were tipsy from drinking
early in the evening? Or because you thought this was
our last meeting? You admitted to me that you had
never slept with your boyfriend. While there is one
category of women lacking in self-assurance who set
out to prove their own insignificance by sleeping with
any man, there is another category who try to show
that they are good for nothing by not having relations
with any men. What have you been trying to prove by
holding back from having sex with your boyfriend of
seven years? And what on earth did you intend by
telling me that fact? What you said left me perplexed.
“Do you love your boyfriend?” “He’s comfortable. Like
an old shoe.” “What did you do with those shoes you
used to wear?” I ought not to have asked that. As a
reading therapist, my readings ought rightly to be
made by analysis, not feelings, but recently I had
become increasingly curious about your private life.
“I’ve just put them away in the shoe cabinet for now;
I don’t know what to do with them. It’s a bother to
keep them and a shame to throw them away.” You looked
at me. The ball seemed to be in my court. I did not
have the heart to tell you to get rid of them. “I
understand. These shoes go well with your dress,
though.” It wastrue, the new shoes really suited you.
“Why, just look what time it is,” you exclaimed,
looking at your wristwatch. You meant it was time for
the television drama. I quickly blurted out, “Can’t
you watch a repeat broadcast? It seems you can watch
programs again on the Internet.”

Nowadays
the influence of the author has clearly diminished
while the influence of the reader is growing stronger
every day. The meaning of a book is determined, not
according to the author’s creative ability but by the
reader’s tastes. Somebody has said that there are many
gaps in books, gaps that the reader has to fill in,
and until they are filled in, every book is
essentially nothing but an incomplete draft. Worse
still, with popular television dramas, it is the
viewers who decide what the ending will be. Your
preference can make a female lead character who is dying of an
incurable disease suddenly recover, or bring back
together lovers who have become enemies by some irony
of fate.

I
wonder what ending you wanted that evening. You could
have rushed out of the bar, grabbed a taxi, hurried
home and ascertained the fate of the lead characters.
From your point of view, that might not have been such
a bad ending but for me that was going to be a
disappointing one. No. Watching a repeat broadcast of
the drama would be better. Readers of this story will
surely agree.

Another
possible ending has you accepting my request to stay
and drinking to the end. The end everyone wants,
except you. Even for you, it might not be such a
disagreeable ending. If just one person wants
something, that remains a dream, but if everyone wants
it, then it becomes a reality, surely? Besides, I am
both your reading therapist and your reader, so I have
the right to choose the ending. So that evening you
were unable to watch the drama. On the whole, the
atmosphere as we sat drinking will have been pleasant.
Let’s say that we shared the kind of talk usually
exchanged at private parties when people let down
their guard. As the evening wore on, barriers will
have gone down lower, discretion weaker. That evening,
though we drank a lot, let’s say that nothing went
wrong. Then you and I went to a motel.

At
this point we need some more details. Details provide
the readers with inspiration. Even absurd stories
depend on the skill with which the details are
provided. What if I were D. H. Lawrence, who so
boldly expressed people’s sexual desires? Returning
from the powder room, you blew into my ear as you
whispered: I want to read you. At that you and I left
the bar and found a motel. Or suppose I try the style
of hard-boiled Ernest Hemingway? We staggered out of
the bar. The city by night was noisy and cunning as a
rat. I looked at your sharp lips and had a sudden
thought. There’s nothing I can’t do. I grabbed your
wrist and began to stride toward a motel. Or what
about something in the style of James Joyce, who
clings so tenaciously to complex, subtle human
psychology? As the fifth taxi in a row refused to take
you and went speeding off, I glimpsed your far from
despondent expression and started to wonder if you did
not have the same idea as I had. When the sixth taxi
driver shook his head and drove away on hearing me
shout out your destination, I gave up and decided to
accept everything gladly. “What about getting some
rest first and trying later?” You seemed neither
willing nor unwilling as I grasped you by the wrist
and headed for an alley lined with small motels.
Hoping to disguise the excitement and guilt seething
within me, I tightened my grip on your wrist.

When I woke the next morning, thirsty and
with my head aching, you were no longer beside me.
Were it not for the note lying on the table, I might
have doubted whether I had been with you last night.

You were
sleeping so soundly I couldn’t wake you. I reckon I
can break up with my boyfriend now. Thanks for
everything. Look after yourself. BTW there’s a hole
in your sock so I bought a new pair in the store
next door, you should wear them when you leave.

You
had completely removed every trace of yourself, as if
erasing the fact that you had ever entered the motel
room, but had not been able to do anything about the
red stain on the sheet. It was true; you had never
slept with your seven-year boyfriend.

After
that, I was unable to see you. You dropped out of
sight like a child who has gone off to play after
finishing some old homework. I longed to meet you
again at least once but there was no way I could
contact you. Your mobile number was suddenly no longer valid. It seemed clear that you had changed your number
when you bought the phone with a camera. There was no
address or contact phone number on your reading card.
Not having asked for the client’s personal
information, the reading card was no help in finding
you. So long as you did not visit me or make contact,
it looked like it would be difficult to meet you
again.

I
was finally able to find out about your current
situation, thanks entirely to the Internet. You told
me you had opened a personal home page and that
provided the clue. First I joined the community in
which your page was located. Once in, so long as you
know a person’s gender, age and
name, you can find whoever you are looking for. The
fact that your name was one usually given to boys was
a great help; there were only two thirty-year-old
women with your name who had home pages.

You
were busily baking bread, from baguettes and bagels,
familiar names, to rosetta and savarin, that I had
never even heard of. In the photos, that either you
yourself or someone else had taken, you looked full of
self-confidence and really happy. You also posted
without hesitation notes about your everyday feelings.
That would have been unthinkable until just
recently.
The drama you enjoyed seemed to have changed your life
a lot.

Now
I have the feeling that I know far more about you than
during our sessions. Without phoning or meeting you, I
am able to know everything ― what kind of bread you baked that day,
how you are feeling, who you have met, where you have
been. So long as you keep uploading photos regularly,
I even know what clothes you are wearing, what your
face is saying. I am able to read you again. I cannot
change your life as your favorite drama did, but that is
enough. You are still my book, so even though you are
busy baking, watching dramas, meeting some new man,
you must not grow lazy when it comes to uploading
photos, writing things that give a glimpse of your
daily life, changing your background music.

Then
I realize I am dreading a sentence, since I am so curious about your present doings.

For
the past two weeks there have been no new postings.

[1]Yukio
Mishima, The
Temple of the Golden Pavilion. I have
deliberately not given page numbers. Since
deliberate unkindness is not pleasant, the footnotes
that follow may be ignored. It is a matter of
digging a well for someone thirsty, so if you are
interested in the exact source of a reference, you
should get hold of the book and start reading at the
first sentence and go on until you find the sentence
quoted, until you verify that there really is such a
sentence. Compared to the effort involved in seeking
out a special bench or path, an island or valley
marked on no map, that form the setting for some
movie or drama, it’s like swimming with one foot on
the bottom, so I hope your reading will set you
free.

[3]
For reference, if I summarize the main contents of
the reading card you completed, it would be: Book
currently being read: Dieting: Let’s
do it right. Book read with deep emotion: Demian.
Book you would recommend to someone you care about:
The You inside
Me Whenever I Shut my Eyes Alone. Book you
hope to read in the future: Twenty-seven
Reasons why Someone Baking Bread is Beautiful.